Shoe Box
by CeeCeeSings
Summary: Hi lovely Caryl shippers! This is a one-shot based on the following contest prompt from the USS Caryl Tumblr: Write a Caryl-centric story that a) takes place in the watchtower; b) contains the phrase "deer are so (f**king) majestic"; and c) reference the following items: a rubber ducky, a purple scarf, a toothbrush and a shoe box. I missed writing about Caryl, so...


Dawn, on the watchtower.

The sky is awash in color: grey, indigo, purple and orange. The overnight shift is sometimes the hardest, he thinks, because it creates a true war-like feeling: a combination of utter boredom, staring into the unblinking darkness, and utter fear, of what that darkness may be hiding.

He adjusts the strap of his crossbow, raises his arms over his head, groaning with relief as something pops like distant gunfire in his lower back. He pulls his toothbrush from his pack, swigs some water, brushes recklessly. It is his passing nod to personal hygiene, if only because _her_ shift is next. Carol.

As the sun bubbles up from the distant clouds, he picks out the shambling dead, so artless and pathetic even in the forgiving morning light. His eyes roam from one wasted, reanimated corpse to another, until they alight on something entirely different along the tree line of the woods: a quartet of deer, a buck and three does. His heart lifts in his chest; deer are far rarer than they were before the world had gone to hell in a hand basket. Nothing like the voracious, endlessly hungry dead to keep the wildlife population down.

His grumbling stomach is thinking of rich venison stew, but his heart is thinking of something else: himself at eleven, hunting for the first time with his older, much-adored brother. Merle had taken him out, yes, and explained, in graphic detail, many aspects of manhood to a rapt (and admittedly, a somewhat fearful) Daryl. But when they had finally spotted that first buck, the snide look Merle usually wore fell away.

"Lookit 'im, baby brother. He don't know he's our dinner. He just carries on, tall and proud. Deer are so fucking majestic," Merle sighed, then put a bullet through the creature.

And now, over twenty-five years later, he hears another sigh, from behind him. He turns, and there she is, approaching the railing, where he is standing. She looks out, catches sight of the deer, and sighs again, as Merle did all those years ago.

"They are so beautiful," she says, and his clumsy heart responds mentally, _And so are you._ She has pulled on a cream-colored sweater and wrapped a scarf the colors of the sunrise around her neck to keep back the early morning chill. He is thinking of another scarf, the one he keeps tucked way down in his bag, as a reminder, and a warning: anyone can be gone in a blink of eye or the lunge of a walker. Scraps of fabric, reflecting different realities: when he found the first one, it was a relic of what might have been. And now this one, under which beats her very living pulse.

"And tasty," he replies, hoping to make her smile. She does, and swats him. He loves any excuse to create physical contact between the two of them. He still feels her hand on his skin when it has drifted back down to her side. He notices now that she is clutching a small cardboard box with the Nike logo in her other hand.

"Whatcha got in there?"

She smiles again, but it is tinged with sadness. A sadness that is the exact size and shape of a lanky girl with dark blond hair. A sadness that she doesn't have to tell him is with her all of the time, still. Always. _Sophia. _

"Odds and ends, mostly. Things that remind me of her," she smiles, shakes her head. "I don't go through it too often, but every now and then, I like to really _think _about her, remember her how she was, not…not like at the farm."

Something in her face wavers, but she braces herself, smiles. Tears hover in her eyes but do not spill. He is proud of her, and how far she's come. She is not the cowering woman she was at the camp outside Atlanta, or the shattered mother from that sun-blasted day, when he held her back as that scrap of a little girl staggered out of the barn. She has gone through fire, but it hasn't burned her; it has refined her, like sand to glass, into the woman standing beside him.

She moves away to sit against the wall, opens the box. Glances up, pats the spot next to her, inviting him to join her. He does, sliding down to sit next to her, their shoulders touching. Her scarf flutters, the tassels brushing like tiny fingers against his leather jacket.

He looks inside the box. The largest item by far the rag doll he found, so many months ago, in the stream during one of his endless searches for the little girl. He instinctively reaches for it, remembering the brief, brilliant burst of hope he had felt, when he spotted the ratty thing, dirty and soaked. He fights the anger welling up inside of him as it stares up at him accusingly. _You couldn't save her, Daryl. What was the point of all of those days, all of those miles, all of those clues you found? They were just remnants of a little girl who was already dead, in the truest sense of the word. _

"It's the only thing of hers, that was actually hers, that I still have," Carol says, taking the doll from him and placing it gently back in the box. "And I thank you for that."

"Shoulda brought _her _back, not some stupid doll," he grunts.

"Don't be angry, it doesn't suit you as well as it used to," she chides, placing something else in his hand. A fist-sized, bright, yellow rubber ducky. Ernie's best friend, bath time companion of every child in recent history. A smile creeps onto his lips before he can stop it.

Carol laughs a little. "I stole it from Judith."

"Takin' stuff from babies," he mutters a mock reprimand. Her eyes are twinkling, but no longer with tears.

"Maggie and Glenn brought it for her with one of their formula runs. It just brought back all those baths, her splashing around, bubbles everywhere, me, soaked, kneeling on the tile floor," she smiles, remembering. "Ed, he never really got the concept of being a hands-on dad. Bath time was just me and Sophia."

She puts the box on the ground, and puts the duck back in it. Daryl notices a small black book, a pocket Bible. He raises his eyebrows at her, and she nods to him, indicating he can take it out.

"I don't find much comfort in those words, any more," she says, but without bitterness. "I just don't know how much they apply to reality these days. There's a different kind of comfort, though, in that book." She takes it from his hands, and it falls open, as if she regularly consults a particular page. A flower the color of a tea stain falls like a butterfly to rest on his knee. The Cherokee Rose he gave her, a faded memory, a symbol of a mother's love. Still here, still with her.

She lifts it gently from its resting spot on his leg, the touch of her fingertips sending pleasant warmth to his stomach. She closes the box, sets it aside, scoots a little closer to him. She stares out at the rising sun, her profile bathed in warm light.

"A new day," she says. "Every day, a new day. A chance to do it right." And now, it is her hand that flutters, alights on his knee. Rests there. "To be someone better. Because today is what we have. A whole new box of memories."

"Yer right," he says, before he realizes he agrees with her. Today is all they have, the past is faded flowers and lost scarves. Rubber duckies and dead daughters and impressive, terrifying big brothers. She looks over at him, her eyes finally clear and bright. His hand floats down to hers, her fingers making room for his. Twining, together.

Dawn, on the watchtower.


End file.
